Google, in its ongoing fight against hackers and cryptojackers, it has deleted 1 crypto phishing app and 3 fake crypto wallets from PlayStore. The 4 fake crypto apps were deleted from PlayStore recently, after Lukas Stefanko, a malware analyst, made a report about them.
Fake crypto apps are inevitable, since we have started witnessing a huge percent of the populace adopting the cryptocurrencies. So therefore, lay users might easily fall for these fake apps.
One of the reported apps was MetaMask, which the analyst categorized as phishing app because it requests users private key and wallet password upon installations.
Other deleted apps were fake wallet apps, which aim to steal users’ digital assets by ascribing a wallet address to the user, but in reality, these addresses are owned by the app creators.
All these fake apps were taken down by Google from the Playstore immediately after it received a report from Stefanko. While this speedy response Google showed towards such cases at least “relieving”, Stefanko also stated other concerning facts that is beyond what the tech company can do to protect their users.
According to him, it doesn’t take any programming skills at all to create such malicious apps, in fact, the fake wallets were created using “drag-n-drop app builder service without any coding knowledge required”.
This literally means, these fake apps can be developed easily by anyone, put them on PlayStore, and while “waiting” for Google to take them down, they could expect some “benefits” from unsuspecting users.
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